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Dec 21
2018
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Helen Whitten
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2019… Que sera sera …
A new birth, my new granddaughter, is a poignant and happy way to end the year. New life. It seems like a miracle really. One minute she doesn’t exist, the next minute she does. Birth and death and the cycles of life are both ordinary and everyday and yet ultimately extraordinary.
We grandparents can get a hard time from those who don’t have family or as yet don’t have grandchildren. But there is a kind of secret smile that passes from one grandparent to another, even when you don’t know one another. You see a grandfather walking with a toddler in Kew Gardens, catch his eye and you both smile, knowing how precious these moments are.
I think because one is older a new young life, bewildered, vulnerable, in wonder and far from understanding (any more than we do!) the complexities of the world they have entered, is potent. The innocence, the wide-eyed approach to the rituals of the year, whether it is Hallowe’en, Guy Fawkes or Father Christmas is magical.
And as one ages one tends to recognise that family, friends and community are so important when the world outside is in such chaos. Moving to Kew has brought us into a delightful and inspiring community where almost everyone we meet is volunteering in one way or another, as David and I intend to do now that the house is finished (hurrah!). We couldn’t be happier in our choice of move and in the people who surround us, and the numerous interesting activities on our doorstep with theatre, film, galleries, talks, the river and, of course, the wonderful Botanical Gardens where we walk almost every day.
Small things make a difference when we can’t seem to influence what our politicians are doing. But who can predict the long view of history? I have been listening to Roller-coaster, Europe 1950-2017 by Ian Kershaw and am reminded of the huge changes that have occurred in my lifetime both in how we live and also in political regimes. The horrors of Hitler and Stalin exposed the dangers of ideologies, and religion continues to divide rather than bring peace to the world. Living in Communist Poland one might not have been able to predict the freedom they have now. So how can we possibly predict the future?
Here in the UK Brexit dominates and confuses, with no party united in their approach or able to promise that they could do a better deal with Brussels than has been put on the table. A second referendum, perhaps, though this has no certainty of outcome either and in many ways I can’t, without a crystal ball, know what is best for us, or the world, in the long-term. Certainly in the short term staying in is the safest bet but in the long-term I confess to being a little unnerved by the fact that there are far stronger and more vociferous far-right movements in many countries in Europe than there are here, where there is no far-right representative in Parliament. There are stirrings of dissent in France, Italy, Austria, Hungary, the Netherlands and elsewhere and we can’t know how they will be resolved. The challenge of how to manage immigration in a humane yet logistically practical way is one that no country has worked out yet.
All I can hope is that we have an outcome that is good for us all, that maintains the world in peace, prosperity and harmony. But I don’t pretend that I know how to achieve this. I can only hope that historians will be writing in years to come that Trump, Putin, Erdogan, Xi Jinping or any other of these authoritarian ‘strong men’ didn’t bring catastrophe to the world. I am grateful that in the main our world leaders do meet at G7 and G20 meetings, that the EU and UN have facilitated more jaw than war and I shall remain optimistic that wisdom rather than factionalism can be brought into debate within political governments. Long may communication continue to benefit us all.
And so, as my mother used to sing around the house when I was young, “Que sera sera … whatever will be will be. The future’s not ours to see. Que sera sera.” And I shall sing this to my grandchildren, as she did to mine. Such are the cycles of life.
On that note I wish you all a very fulfilling Christmas break and hope that 2019 brings happiness. As I heard someone say on the radio yesterday “everything is beautiful in its own way” so perhaps we can open our eyes to beauty and gratitude as we move into the new year.
[Que Sera Sera, sung by Doris Day, 1956]
Dec 11
2018
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Helen Whitten
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- Brexit, deal, Eagles, EU, Joyce Grenfell, Mrs May, Referendum, voting
… with apologies to Joyce Grenfell
Children … now come along
I’m the head teacher and so let’s hold hands and pull together. No, Boris, not that way … this way!
Michael, come along now. Pull your socks up and hold hands.
David, don’t argue dear … you know I know best. Come along, all you have to do is put a tick in this little box here – the one that says “Yea”. No, not the one that says “Nay”.
Now children stop mimicking a pony’s neigh, that isn’t funny.
Yes, Amber, Yea does mean yes.
“Yes to what?” … Jacob, you don’t need to ask what you are ticking. Just do what I say. I know best. It’s for Queen and country. No-one else seems to have a clue.
Now hold your heads up and play your parts. No, Dominic, you can’t be a superjet so just sit down and keep quiet.
Boris, do stop fiddling. Don’t do that.
Oh dear, Dominic, is that a penknife in your hand? It looks rather sharp! Why were you coming up behind my back just then? You had better give that to me. I shall confiscate it and give it to your Mummy. You go and stand in the corner straight away, you naughty boy.
Ah, there’s a text from Michel, the Head Teacher. What does he want? I hope I am not in trouble. I have tried to be a good girl and do the right thing. Oh, he’s just saying that Jean-Claude has a hangover and that Monsieur Macron is having some difficulties (thank God for that. At least I’m not the only one!). No need to worry, children. I can handle this. You don’t have to concern your little heads over it at all. No, I don’t want your ideas, thankyou.
Boris, do stop shouting and pushing everyone around in that noisy way.
Michael, what are you doing now, saying things in that silly voice? We’re not going to wait for a silly little boy who says silly things like a baby, are we?
Now how can we sing a nice song together when you are all running and pulling in different directions? I am trying to keep you all happy. Come here at once!
Andrea, you want to dance like a rose do you? No, David, you can’t be a carrot; a carrot isn’t a flower is it, you silly boy.
Boris, don’t do that. Behave.
Liam, don’t listen to those silly Irish children. They just don’t know what’s good for them.
David, stop fighting. You can’t be sure to win more sweets than I have got for you from the school kitchen. You should say thankyou, Miss, and be grateful.
No, Boris, you can’t be leader of your team. I am the head teacher here so I tell you what to do.
Are you asking whether I have my fingers crossed, Amber? Yes I do. Is that because I am making a wish or because I am telling fibs? I’m not going to tell you!
Is that a whip in your hand, Boris? You don’t scare me, you silly unruly boy!
Now, listen carefully children, let’s get some discipline here. Put your pens in your hand, there’s good boys and girls. Pick up the paper the kind gentleman has given you and tick the box that says “yea” for yes to my deal.
What ARE you doing?! Now look what’s happened. You’ve ruined everything. You bad children.
Now what?….
I wrote the above as part of a creative writing class. At my French class, in the same week, a fellow student quoted the Eagles’ Hotel California song regarding the EU negotiations… we didn’t realize that “we could check out but we could never leave …”
What a mess. What a shambles for the country. How can anyone plan a business strategy with this going on? The trouble is that politicians rarely run a business so don’t seem to understand the importance of vision, planning and logistics. They just think and argue and rarely have to ‘do’ in the same way that someone running a business has to act.
We have ended up with too many politicians who just go straight from university to the House of Commons. Few even run a corner shop or do work experience, it seems.
And now what, indeed? Whatever happens next – a second referendum, a change of government, a new Tory leader – will guarantee more uncertainty and no certainty whatsoever that there will be a ‘Remain’ vote in a second referendum nor any guarantee that whoever took over would be able to do a better deal, though inevitably we all hope they would. But sitting next to a gentleman who had been a diplomat and had done many negotiations with Brussels in the past, he told me that he didn’t think that the deal Mrs May was presenting was unrealistic.
Do any of us know what is best for this country? The politicians certainly don’t seem to and appear to be focusing on party politics and power games more than what is good for all of us. So who would we vote for anyway? I can’t see a single inspiring person I would put my bet on. We seem to be down a rabbit hole with no way out. Help!
Nov 29
2018
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Helen Whitten
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Reading about the high statistics of mental illness, anxiety and depression that we seem to be experiencing in the UK, I am wondering how these conditions are measured today. I am also wondering, in particular, how well young people are being introduced to the fact that emotions are signals, not something to be afraid of necessarily.
We were with a friend last night who was talking about how she has learnt that when she goes down into a dark mood it is actually signalling a transformation that is often creative. I can relate to this personally as I have spent much of my life trying to avoid feeling glum and doing all I can to stay ‘up’. But as I have become older and – who knows! – perhaps a little wiser, I am far less afraid of those down feelings and have come to recognise them as helpful messages, possibly to go more gently, to take more time out, not to push against life and be willing to accept some disappointments. Sometimes the words of a poem will arise from these low moments.
I guess in an era of celebrity lifestyles, Facebook and Instagram, young people get the impression that life should always be perfect. Rejection, disappointment, failures, mistakes can all take on a stronger impact than they would if one was living in different times when one wasn’t surrounded by images of perfect models and smiley happy people. But disturbing emotions and experiences are part of human life and we can’t and should not try to protect ourselves from the reality that any human life includes suffering, often as much as it includes joy.
So I was horrified to read that students will be allowed to skip exam topics that they find ‘upsetting’. Apparently staff at leading universities have been told not to include disturbing subjects in the compulsory part of academic assessments. The list of sensitive topics in the Sheffield University guidelines includes faith, religion, sexuality, rape, abortion, torture, death and bereavement, as well as LGBTQ topics.
What are we doing in trying to shelter students from these areas of life that are a fundamental part of our human history? Death and bereavement are as much a part of life as birth: how does it help young people to try to paint them out in case they get upset by the idea? It seems those who claim to be upset can then resit the exam later… which, I am sorry, call me a cynic, seems like a great excuse for a bit more revision time!
Yes, much of human life, history and behaviour is profoundly upsetting but it is part of the whole picture. We just reinforce the concept of ‘everything must be easy and perfect’ if we don’t explain the darker side of things. And how can the next generations work towards improving human behaviour if they don’t understand that throughout history there has been murder, violence, robbery, torture and death? How can they know the horror of the two world wars if we do not continue to remind them that their grandfathers lost their lives in the mud and therefore wars should be avoided whenever possible?
Expectations, sometimes unconscious, shape our emotions and behaviours. If we have the expectation that ‘life should be easy’ we shall be disappointed when it isn’t. If we have the expectation that ‘I must be successful’ we will feel like a failure when we don’t get the degree, job or promotion we were hoping for. If we have the expectation that “I ought to be happy all the time” we are going to feel thoroughly fed up on those inevitable days when our mood is far from happy.
So expectations need to be rational. There is no perfect world, no perfect human being. We all make mistakes, get down, anxious or angry and occasionally are rejected by someone or a group of people. This is life and we have to build the inner resilience to manage it as best we can by reminding ourselves that this is normal, it’s ok, and we can work through it. And if we can’t, we can ask for help.
So I hope that instead of blocking out difficult topics, schools and colleges will enable young people to tune into their emotions, recognise that each emotion is providing information and that it helps to make friends with feelings rather than push them away or be fearful of them. It’s about beginning to notice the situations and people that help them feel happy, then noticing that they might feel anxious when they haven’t made a good plan for the future or are imagining a catastrophe that hasn’t even happened yet. And, indeed, may never happen. They might feel angry when they feel threatened and need to step back, take a slow breath, reflect and question how real the threat is and what they might do about it.
Emotions act like a silent and wise navigation process. Emotional messages remind us of our values and personal truths. We need to listen to the cues and act before the emotion becomes overwhelming. We can also learn to detect which emotions are helpful and which are not – for example feeling grief and sadness after a bereavement is natural but if these feelings incapacitate us for years they become unhelpful. Feeling pain and anger when a partner rejects us is natural for a period of time but if we’re still feeling angry after many years then we may be stuck in that anger and it won’t be helping us to get on with life, or to experience more joyful emotions.
We can’t and shouldn’t shelter our young from the fact that life can be hard and difficult. But we should remind them frequently that they have the resources to deal with the downs as well as the ups and give them the tools to listen, accept and work with their emotions to experience the full range of being human. Many creative acts have been inspired by a low mood followed by a burst of inspiration. Let’s try to remove the fear of the black dog. Let’s try to help young people have more realistic expectations of life so that they aren’t stymied when something goes wrong but just recognise it as a life event they can work through. It must be worth a try …
Watch useful video in from World Health Organisation:
http://www.mhinnovation.net/resources/i-had-black-dog-his-name-was-depression
Emotional Healing for Dummies by Helen Whitten and David Beales, Wiley 2010https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Emotional+Healing+For+Dummies-p-9780470747643
Future Directions: Practical ways to develop emotional intelligence and confidence in young people by Helen Whitten and Diane Carrington, Network Continuum, 2006https://www.amazon.co.uk/Future-Directions-intelligence-confidence-Intelligence/dp/1855391988/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1543491183&sr=8-1&keywords=future+directions+helen+whitten
Nov 17
2018
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Helen Whitten
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After a week of such turmoil I can think of little to say other than to share with you the poem I wrote about Brexit:
The Brexit Ship by Helen Whitten
Buffeted and adrift on a turbulent sea
the anchor is up, the mooring rope cut.
We slip between waves of deceit,
lurch around rocks,
lost in caverns of denial.
The Brexit ship is stuck in a fog
of conflict and confusion.
No direction has been set,
the navigation charts sunk long ago
in the depths of egotism and back-stabbing,
intransigence on all sides.
Which way now the crew ask
to China, India, New York?
On lands far and wide people wait and watch,
scratch their heads in bewilderment.
The captain’s shoulders shrug in despair
no answer forthcoming,
no-one at the helm,
the boat twists and turns
somewhere out at sea.
Hey ho, and so it goes on and presumably, one day, we shall end up in a place of greater clarity!
Nov 02
2018
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Helen Whitten
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We’ve been surrounded by skeletons, skulls, pumpkins and zombies this week. Hallowe’en has really caught on in a big way in the UK these days and here in Kew we had trick or treaters and small children dressed in all kinds of bloodthirsty outfits knocking on our door. It’s fun and yet far distant from its Christian origins back in 1745 when Hallowe’en stood for Hallowed or Holy Evening, this, in turn, potentially stemming from Aztec, Mexican and Celtic rituals celebrating the dead.
It got me thinking about ancestors and reminded me of taking my granddaughter to see the film Coco last year, a cartoon about a young Mexican boy transported to the Land of the Dead. One scene struck me particularly and this was the suggestion – a surmise obviously – that once there is no one left on earth who remembers you then your soul loses its energy. That certainly made me think how quickly one can be forgotten. I only knew my grandmother and great-grandmother on my mother’s side but beyond that I don’t remember my grandparents at all.
And yet their presence inevitably lives on in my family’s awareness and we are fortunate enough to have a family tree going back to the thirteenth century on my father’s side. But a family tree only gives names and dates and occasionally place names – one learns little about the person themselves.
My mother always said that she didn’t believe in an afterlife or in ghosts and yet I have had experiences where I had a sense of a ghost, or was it a shadow? Once, in the dormitory during my first term at Cranborne Chase, of my great-grandmother sitting on my bed. A quiet shadow, very benign. Another time a strange moment when I was sure the phone went in the middle of the night and my mother’s voice said “hello pets” in the way she always had … and yet she was dead by that time. There have been other moments when I have felt someone tap my shoulder when no one was there and these have left me with a questionmark about the mystery of death and what is beyond.
Earlier this year David and I both read Irvin Yalom’s book Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death, which we found very thought-provoking. Yalom takes examples of patients who have feared death and explores the subject from many perspectives. A key message for us was the idea that we create ‘ripples’ around us as we go through life. Yalom suggests that we should analyse our behaviour and the ripples we may have made in life up until this point and then consider carefully how we might live the next five or ten years differently to ensure that the ripples we create around us leave as positive a legacy as possible.
It’s a salutary reminder to be as kind and well-behaved as one is able! Reading another excellent book this week – The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street by Susan Jane Gilman – brought this home to me, as the main character’s husband dies suddenly of a heart attack just after she has been absolutely horrible to him. Ouch. I wouldn’t want that to happen, certainly.
It seems that ancestors have suddenly become even more important as, according to a new book on DNA, Blueprint: How DNA Makes us Who we Are by Robert Plomin, it is actually our DNA that shapes our intelligence, likelihood of success, ability at sports, whether we are kind or nasty, and even whether we enjoy a cup of coffee in the morning or not. So perhaps we should look into the lives of our predecessors and consider what talents or quirks we have inherited and from whom. Food for thought, certainly. So I shall raise a toast to my shadowy ancestors tonight and wonder from whom I inherited my delight in a good glass of wine!
Oct 13
2018
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Helen Whitten
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My new car doesn’t have a CD player. The Peugeot salesman told me it was dead easy – just plug your iPhone into the slot and you have music. But I don’t… because I have never bothered to download music onto my iPhone. When I am travelling on the tube I have watched and overheard the incessant sound of music drumming in other people’s ears but never really felt the urge to listen to music in this way. I have rather enjoyed a little silence. And silence is hard to come by these days.
But in the car I do like to listen to music and just at the moment I can’t because I can’t get the dratted iPhone to transmit anything that I really want. Sporadically I succeed in listening to Spotify but it doesn’t seem to work every time and I end up thoroughly frustrated. In the house we have Alexa and it plays some of the music we want to listen to but again we haven’t mastered the technology enough to get it to play everything we want.
And so both of us look at our CDs and feel nostalgic that they are disappearing. David’s study is full of his old vinyl records and I can understand why. I did sell most of mine, except for my Beatles and Stones collection, of course. And weren’t we told that CDs would last for ever? But they don’t, do they? They jump and get stuck just as the old vinyl did.
And so now everything is streaming and, as I sat in a wonderful concert of Chopin Concertos in the OSM in Montreal last night, I suddenly realised that giving music to a loved one is no longer possible. When my granddaughter started to play the piano I gave her some CDs of beautiful piano music including Beethoven’s Emperor, and my son put them on for her at night to calm her into sleep. But now their house, like the houses of most of our young, is all digital and streamed and clever and so the opportunity for me to gift a CD of music to her now has gone. And I realize that this actually makes me rather sad, and a little discombobulated.
At my school, Cranborne Chase, we were surrounded by music as Harrison Birtwhistle was our Head of Music and although I never played very well I soaked up the wonderful concerts we had every weekend. At home, my parents listened to music often and my father had a varied selection of classical records that he would enjoy playing, introducing us to his favourite movements. My first memories are of the old-style wind-up gramophone – perhaps it was my grandmother’s. Then in came the little Dansette and the stylus that endlessly needed changing. My grandmother played the piano quite well and so at Christmas time we would congregate around her to sing carols and songs, and in times gone by this was the only option for listening to music as there wasn’t a record player or radio let alone a Sonus or Alexa to play constant background music.
But this is perhaps the problem – the “constant background” music that, unless one specifically goes to a concert as we did last night, removes the practice of sitting quietly with other people in the room to really listen to a piece of music. I remember I needed to be reminded of this too, a few years’ ago, when a friend introduced me to Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata and, as there were three of us in the room, I continued to chatter away. “Ssssh,” he said. “Just listen.” And so we sat in silence and the music drew us in, in a way it never would have done if we had continued to talk and thereby push it into the background.
How hard, but how magical, that can be – for several of you in a room at home to stop talking, stop reading, and truly listen to a piece of music. I wonder when you last did so?
And how important, I feel, to help our grandchildren learn the beauty of deep listening when they are living in a world where music blares at us in shops, hotels, restaurants and through our habitual practices of listening through headphones on the tube while at the same time downloading texts or emails or reading the news. Dissipated attention becomes the norm. Really hearing the notes becomes infrequent.
Before last night’s concert Kent Nagano, the conductor and Director of Music at the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal, gave a lecture and told an interesting story of how he and an audience had been deeply moved by the beauty and poignance of a Brahms concert. So when he noticed that it was to be performed on the radio a week later he tuned in, expecting to be transported once more. But only to be disappointed. The music that had moved people to tears in the concert hall had not transferred well to the digital medium and had lost its depth. With this in mind he is experimenting himself with methods to capture the essence of a live piece onto a digital recording without losing the magic.
And so the Chopin Concertos were being recorded live last night which terrified me as I had a cough. But it was sublime and unusually the concert was stopped in the middle of Charles Richard-Hamelin’s performance to retune the piano as one note had gone off tune. We had never seen this happen before and of course to the attuned ear nothing less than perfection will do. And so I suppose my point is how do we attune our ears and the ears of our children and grandchildren to really hear and notice the perfection of a piece, the mood you pick up as you consider what the composer might have been feeling or trying to describe as he or she wrote the music.
In the meantime, when I get back to London, I shall have to brace myself to get up to date and get my car’s music system working. The idea of this challenge fills me with a sense of trepidation and tedium but the goal of having music to listen to as I drive will make sure I bite the bullet and learn how to stream. And I shall also ensure that we make it a habit to go to concerts more often now that we are in Kew. And gradually, as my grandchildren grow up, I shall endeavour to take them to concerts too, so that they can experience the emotions and imagination stirred by really listening to a piece of music. And hope that they share that exquisite experience of being in a huge concert hall where the silence of the audience nonetheless allows one to hear a single exquisite note.